senzenwomen | Sugita Tsuruko (1882-1957)

Sugita Tsuruko, or Tsuru, was born in 1882 in Kobe, the great-great-granddaughter (one great more or less) of the Edo-era doctor Sugita Gempaku, one of the first Japanese doctors to study Western medicine. (Other branches of the family tree include the entomologist Ezaki Teizo and his German wife Charlotte, as well as the baseball player Hasebe Ginji.)

Following the family tradition of a medical career, Tsuru entered the private Kansai Medical School [kind of a cram school for students interested in taking the doctors’ qualifying exam?] in Osaka in 1905; her father, also a doctor, died the following year. She passed the national exam in 1908, transferred to a medical school in Tokyo when the Osaka school closed down, and in the same year passed the qualifying exam for opening a clinic. While studying pediatric medicine at Tokyo Imperial University, she opened her own pediatric clinic in Tokyo in 1911.

In 1913 Tsuru became publisher of the Japan Women Doctors’ Association journal; through her work with the Association she also got to know Yoshioka Yayoi among others. Amid her professional responsibilities she somehow found time to become a poet as well, publishing a collection of her work in 1940.

In 1945, Tsuru’s own clinic and the Association offices were bombed. She opened a home for war orphans in Kanagawa and remained there as doctor in charge (the institution is now part of the National Kanagawa Hospital). She died in 1957.